Top 15 Films of 2024 – Allen’s Picks

Normally, when I sit down to write these end of year lists, I have a fairly good understanding of where certain films will land. The top five to seven entries are usually locked into place, and it’s just a matter of sorting out the remaining spots. 2024 posed a different challenge. This is the first time in a long time where I wasn’t sure what should go where. The year was chock full of such outstanding work that I found myself reordering the list multiple times. Even now, with the final fifteen laid out below, I could easily go back and create a brand new list with an entirely new set of films. Obviously, naming the best movies of the year is a silly exercise. How can we really rate one above the other? But the struggles I had goes to show how strong and diverse the offering was in the last twelve months. Don’t ever let anyone tell you it’s been a bad year in movies – that just means they aren’t looking hard enough.
If there was a theme for 2024, it would be “Transition.” With a rapidly changing social and political landscape, the rise of technological advancements such as A.I., and a crop of new artistic voices stepping into the spotlight, cinema is at a state both exciting and unknown. It will be interesting to see how the industry will change in just the next year alone. Will it change for the better or for the worse? Will filmmakers adapt to new creative ways of storytelling, or will they fall victim to the changing times? Will we see trends reverse – embracing the past to help inform the filmmaking process in the present and future? Or will studios continue to run like profit making machines, suppressing individuality in favor of the almighty dollar? It will be fascinating to see how it all plays out.
As per tradition around these parts, we start off with a list of my Honorable Mentions. Many of these came very close to making my final list, and all of them are worth your time:
Red Rooms, The Kitchen, Time Bomb: Y2K, Sometimes I Think About Dying, Fitting In, The Greatest Night in Pop, The Space Race, This Is Me…Now, Spaceman, Dune Part Two, Road House, Civil War, Lover Stalker Killer, Infested, Challengers, Love Lies Bleeding, The Fall Guy, Abigail, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Exhuma, Hit Man, MoviePass, MovieCrash, Brats, I Saw The TV Glow, Inside Out 2, Ultraman: Rising, Tell Them You Love Me, The Bikeriders, Daddio, Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1, In a Violent Nature, Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, The Imaginary, Longlegs, Young Woman and the Sea, Wicked Little Letters, Maxxxine, The Instigators, Kinds of Kindness, The Dead Don’t Hurt, Adam Sandler: Love You, One More Shot, Rebel Ridge, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Apollo 13: Survival, Alien: Romulus, Speak No Evil, His Three Daughters, Wolfs, Will & Harper, The Outrun, The Apprentice, Jim Henson: Idea Man, Daughters, Woman of the Hour, Smile 2, Music by John Williams, Remembering Gene Wilder, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, The Old Oak, Green Border, My Old Ass, Super/Man: The Christopher Reeves Story, Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, Memoir of a Snail, Transformers One, MadS, Evil Does Not Exist, Janet Planet, Saturday Night, A Different Man, All We Carry, Made In England: The Films of Powell & Pressburger, Fish War, The Room Next Door, Dìdi, Rainier: A Beer Odyssey, Thelma, Gasoline Rainbow, Flow, The Last Showgirl, September 5, Sleep, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, I’m Still Here, Heretic, Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, The People’s Joker, The Order, Nosferatu, Wicked, The Piano Lesson, Maria, Sugarcane, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, No Other Land, Better Man, Kneecap, Day of the Fight, Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point.
Now that that’s out of the way, let’s jump into my Top Films of 2024:
The Shadow Strays (2024) is an absolute blast to the senses. Hailing out of Indonesia, it is a cacophony of bullets, blood, and body parts. Writer/director Timo Tjahjanto takes a familiar genre trope (assassin discovers they have a heart of gold) and amplifies the ultra violence to an absurd degree. At a lengthy two and a half hours, this has an epic scope but never drags. It is continuous energy from start to finish. Each of the set pieces are brutal and in your face, and the climactic fight scene is one of the great action showdowns. For fans of the genre, this is one you cannot miss. It was one of the most badass cinematic experiences I’ve had all year.
Twisty, complex, but never convoluted, It’s What’s Inside (2024) uses a sci-fi/body swap/horror premise to expose the dark secrets of a group of friends reuniting for a pre-wedding party. It becomes a whodunnit, but with people switching bodies like a round robin of shifting personalities. Writer/director Greg Jardin (who also edits) crafts the narrative as a high energy, constantly moving mystery. Characters lose track of their friends and even of themselves. The use of color, a constantly moving camera, and non-stop pacing creates an imaginative world for these characters to play in. The carefully constructed surfaces people put out into the world are dismantled, revealing their true, not so pleasant natures. This is clever, imaginative filmmaking. I had a lot of fun with it.
Writer/director Payal Kapadia paints All We Imagine as Light (2024) with romanticism, longing, and a profound regard to her home city of Mumbai. There is a timeless quality in its style, themes, and execution. The cinematography and production design makes the film feel like it was shot decades ago. It is so utterly empathetic to its characters and story – presenting them with such finesse that it almost feels like a magic trick. We get wrapped up in the journeys of the women Prabha (Kani Kusruti), Anu (Divya Prabha) and Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), and their desires for happiness, peace, and love, that we can’t help but connect to them on an emotional level. Like the work of Wong Kar-Wai, Kapadia utilizes time and setting to explore the depths of the human heart.
12) Ghostlight
A testament to the healing power of art, directing team Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson’s Ghostlight (2024) is a down to Earth, grounded story. It takes a family suffering from pain and sorrow and transforms them through performance and community. Keith Kupferer delivers a quietly devastating performance as a husband and father still reeling from a terrible personal tragedy. But once he joins a local theater group, he finds a way to express his built up emotions in positive and healing ways. Featuring excellent supporting work from Katherine Mallen Kupferer, Tara Mallen, and Dolly De Leon, Ghostlight is a moving and intimate drama that hits our heartstrings without ever feeling manipulative or overly melodramatic.
11) Nickel Boys
Incorporating a visual palette in which we see events almost entirely from the point of view of the characters, Nickel Boys (2024) tells the heartbreaking story of two young black men dealing with the brutal living conditions of a notorious reform school in mid 20th century Florida. The trauma, abuse, and racism both characters face have a ripple effect that lasts throughout time. The fact that we witness everything through their eyes makes the experience even more harrowing. But beneath the pain and hardships lies a glimmer of humanity – a bond between two people that will last forever. Director RaMell Ross takes Colson Whitehead’s novel of the same name and creates a cinematic work of art that is daring and ambitious. We’ve seen films told from a person’s point of view before, but with Nickel Boys it feels like we are delving into someone’s dreams, memories, and nightmares. Film has the power to put us into a stranger’s shoes and see the world from their perspective. You won’t find a better example of that concept than this.